There was an air-quality researcher who tried getting samples in Toronto, of pollen.
He couldn't find the pollen.
Only tires-particles.
The significance of the changes in tires, since the 1970's, is astonishing.
What tires can do, nowadays, .. outright unbelievable, compared with way back when.
Look at how far over modern bicycle-racers can lean, compared with images of the old races, when their tires hadn't anywhere near the grip they've got now..
but they're still being poured into the atmosphere at stunning rate..
All the wear of your tires, as the tread gets thinner, its going into the ecology, either the air or the waters or the land around the roads,
& then you've got the oceans-of-used-tires which often can't be recycled, or cost too much to be recycled..
There has been extensive study on this stuff, btw, dig a bit & you'll find some in-depth stuff!
Record droughts in some places, record rains in others. Regular patterns breaking down means the extremes get more extreme, the swings get more rapid. That's not good news for anything.
It also means areas that have, over centuries, ecologically, culturally and technologically adapted to lots of rain are now hit by droughts, and vice versa.
Climate change is moving water around, not creating or destroying it. Warmer air holds more water, so overall, the atmosphere can hold (and at times drop) more water than before. Permanent ice is melting as well, so that puts a bit more fresh water into the air and ocean. The water in the atmosphere is constantly circling the globe, forced largely by the rotation of the earth. Warmer temperature also makes for more evapotranspiration, so more fresh surface water is pulled into the air. But that same water will eventually fall elsewhere.
The sun is the source of energy that drives wind, rain, and evaporation. When you trap more of that energy with GHGs, it just turns up the volume for all of those things. There’s always seasonal and geographic variability, but the extremes increase because all those phenomena are solar powered.
Cool, that's more of what I meant when I said "where is it going?" I didn't think it was disappearing; I more meant, "Where is it being stored or released?" Makes sense why there would be more of it when precipitation does show up, given that hotter air can store more.
I'm still curious, though, if certain local patterns are moving off to other locations. I'll have to look into that aspect, now that I kind of have an idea what to look for.
There’s been talk of some crops being able to be grown further north or south. But most of the weather patterns of a region are a function of proximity to ocean, predominant winds, and topography. It’s important not to confuse weather and climate. For a given drought or flood people may want to point to climate change as a cause, but it’s only going to amplify patterns that already existed.
I'm not an expert, but it's a very complex global system with moisture in the atmosphere sometimes falling as rain/snow, collecting in rivers and lakes, going into ground water/aquifers, flowing into the oceans, and sometimes just staying as moist air. If one area isn't getting it's usual rainfall, quite often another area is getting more, but it can also be that the moisture is just in other parts of that complex system. A lot is driven by high- and low-pressure systems, air temperature, water temperature, etc.
In my area of southern California, we've had some major, extended droughts. But the rising temperature of the Pacific has caused the air to hold more moisture, and we've also had some "atmospheric river" storms that drop insane amounts of rain. So even though we get an average of 13 inches of rain a year, we got more than 13 inches in just February, and we're up to almost 31 inches for the season. It wouldn't be surprising if we didn't get anymore until late in the year though.
Some of that rain went into snowpack, some into reservoirs, some into ground water, but we're close to the coast and all of it will go back to the ocean. Did we get rain that would normally have gone elsewhere, or was it rain that wouldn't normally have formed? I think it's likely hard to say, but maybe there are meteorologists or others who know more reading this.
I don't know about the disposal of rubber, but the production of rubber has historically enslaved and destroyed entire populations and environmentally wrecked whole regions of the earth in Africa and South America...
Natural rubber (latex) is biodegradable, but that doesn't mean it isn't bad for the environment. The production and disposal of natural latex causes all sorts of problems unrelated to microplastics.
Synthetic rubber is chemically distinct from plastic, but still breaks down into microplastics.
Natural rubber tires are vulcanized, which makes the rubber more resilient, but also more damaging to the environment.
What's crazy is that we could do soooo much better, but it would mean rich people would make less money. Not no money, just less of it.
Nothing needs to be made of plastic. It's cheap and convenient, which just means "profitable." If we didn't use plastics, we'd use something else and it would be less profitable.
It's part of the problem, but I don't think we've studied individual contributors as much as looked at the big picture. There was a recent study on plastics in general that has some citations of the statistics it gathers, and I ran across it in looking up specifically the rubber from tires, aka tire dust from wear and tear (which all vehicles have to some degree, even EVs, and is often a part of the argument of less cars rather than different cars). So about 1 millions tons of the annual contribution to plastics in the ocean is due to tire dust in runoff waters. Also keep in mind that like many large studies that take a while to put together, I think a lot of these statistics are old (around 2016). It's probably worse now.
I think their point was that there isn't anything humans could do during the night. Stars might give some light, but without a full moon you really can't do anything at night without lights.
i mean yeah, but even then starlight is basically fuck all. The moon overpowers those, it just makes the sky look pretty. That's it.
Cloud cover would be primarily lit by moonlit. And even then, moon light is very dim. Just look at early moon light towers used to light up residential areas early in the electrification period.
It's literally the difference between being in your home, at night, and you can't see shit. Vs you can just barely make out where things are, and navigate properly.
Also semantic point, light pollution is not "dark" that's why you can't see any stars. Ever looked at a highway lit with LEDs recently? They have tons of light pollution that can be seen as what's referred to as "sky glow" My point here being, when you go outside in a light polluted area at night, it's literally not dark.
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